‘“Framed-up by the frame”:

Deception and point of view in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract’

Mário Avelar

(Universidade Aberta)

While I doing my research for this essay some lines from Frank O’Hara’s poem on Billie Holiday’s

death, “The Day Lady Died”, kept coming back to my mind: ‘It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/ three

days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine.’ (O’Hara 146) The American poet

records a succession of ordinary events until he reached ‘the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre

and / casually ask[ed] for a carton of Gauloises and a carton / of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK

POST with her face on it.’ (146) Those banal (non-)events that sooner or later would be deleted

from his memory, are recorded by the mind and by the poem because something powerful

happened; something powerful made them meaningful.

Everyone has been through this kind of survival of the ordinary by memory. Sometimes the

pathos of loosing someone dear; sometimes something in the community sphere – everyone

reminds the non-events lived when the news of the twin towers attack reached each and

everyone of us – fixes banality in our minds. Hopefully the survival by memory may touch us

because of power aesthetical events.

One of the most powerful aesthetic experiences that I have been through, happened in the early

ninety eighties when I first saw Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract. It was a spring

sunny afternoon – I can’t promise it was spring but that’s the way I like to recollect it. Anyway I’m

sure I didn’t forget the place I went to afterwards, the people I met and with whom I shared my

perplexity. I may have written a review of this film, since in those days it was something I used to

do every week. As I lost track of those pieces, I just cannot be sure if I did. Anyway I remember

the perplexity I felt, mainly because of the way Greenaway articulated the memory of discourses

and genres (the historical film) with unexpected ones (Agatha Christie’s mystery novels) that

functioned as a kind of subtext. Besides there was Michael Nyman’s music. His music had a

hybrid texture – revisiting Henry Purcell’s with a minimalist rhythm – and functioned as an ironic

counterpoint to the narrative eventually emerging as a subtext.

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In this essay I will ponder on a specific topic that still remains for me one of this film most intense

aesthetic dimension: how the frame and the space remaining outside its limits helps building a

point of view. My analysis will be anchored on one chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s L’Image-

Mouvement, “Cadre et plan, cadrage et decoupage”.

In Narration in Light – Studies in Cinematic Point of View , George M. Wilson reminds how the

viewer usually interacts with film: ‘In most films, the film maker presupposes a commonplace

perspective that is automatically and unthinkingly available to a standard, contemporary

audience. The narrational strategies that are employed are correspondingly conventional and

undemanding.’ (Wilson 7) Wilson stresses the innocent complicity between the viewer and the

object; a complicity anchored on a tradition of seeing. In contemporary Western societies this

tradition relies mainly in the so-called Hollywood aesthetics, with its own imaginary, rhythm, genre

and narrative conventions, and foreseeable dénouements. Rhythm plays a determinant role in the

interaction between the viewer and the object, since it has been connected with an increasingly

accelerating process of perception. This process involves two dimensions: the movement of the

camera, and the ‘durée’, the length of time of each shot. By the end of the silent era ‘about one

shot in ten involved a moving camera, whereas in 1935, one shot in three involved a moving

rather than a stationary camera.’ (Pramaggiore and Wallis, 91)

The stationary camera implied a considerable duration of each shot. Nowadays shots become

even shorter, and the stationary camera may even be dynamized by the editing process.

Pramaggiore and Wallis quote film scholar Michael Brandt on this issue: ‘films cut traditionally

[have] an average shot length of 5.15 seconds, compared to 4.75 seconds for the electronically

cut films…’ These technical and also aesthetic changes imply deep changes at the perception

level: ‘Other studies have shown that it takes an audience anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds to

adjust to a new shot. If it takes the audience to adjust to a cut to a shot, what happens when the

average shot length is so short that the audience is never given a chance to catch up? …

Certainly, as each viewer picks and chooses the shots he or she pays attention to, there must be

shots which audience members never fully absorb.” (Pramaggiore and Wallis, 166)

One of the most ordinary comments on Portuguese contemporary cinema and on its most

distinguished author, Manoel de Oliveira, deals with his ‘theatricality,’ meaning, among other

things, a certain rhythm that definitely goes against the dominant current usually connected with

American movies. Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract also goes against the current

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when he chooses to rely on the stationary camera as single eye observer instead of relying on

editing (at this level he also goes against Eisenstein’s editing aesthetic emphasis). The stationary

camera in a certain sense juxtaposes its point of view with the viewer’s: the film frame ‘comes

closer’ to painting. This aesthetic option somehow reminds the aesthetic of the silent era: ‘…

quelle était la situation du cinema au début? D’une part la prise de vue était fixe, le plan était

donc spatial et formellement immobile; d’autre part l’appareil de prise de vue était confondu avec

l’appareil de projection, doué d’un temps uniforme abstrait.” (Deleuze 12) I wrote ‘somehow’ since

Greenaway is not technically forced to follow that strategy; instead in a rather evident post-

modern pastiche he seems to mimic those earlier strategies. His relying on the fixed camera

demands an obvious attention from the viewer: ‘alors le plan cessera d’être une catégorie

spatiale pour devenir temporal.’ (12) Each frame welcomes signs that are memories of previous

events, and signs that foreshadow coming events. Besides each frame may enhance a dialogue

with visual arts such as drawing and painting. In his 1950 essay ‘Painting and Cinema’ André

Bazin focuses on the frame in order to distinguish these arts: ‘The frame of painting contains a

special world that exists exclusively by itself and only for itself. Filmic space, by contrast, moves

outward, centrifugally, by reaching far into the deepest and lowest recesses of daily life.’ (Vache,

21) Even in its stillness each frame is a microcosm diachronically dealing with a line in time: a

past and a future. Each frame implies a continuum (time) and a macrocosm (place).

The framing process may have semiotic implications beyond the aesthetic level. Deleuze’s

definition unveils the system underlying the frame as semiotic soil: ‘On appelle cadrage la

determination d’un système clos, relativement clos, qui comprend tout ce qui est present dans

l’image, décors, personnes, accessoires. Le cadre constitue donc un ensemble qui a un grand

nombre de parties, c’est-à-dire d’éléments qui entrent eux-mêmes dans les sous-ensembles. ...

Évidemment, ces parties sont elles-mêmes en image. Ce qui fait dire à Jakobson que ce sont des

objets-signes, et, à Pasolini, des «cinèmes».’ (Deleuze 23) How some of these notions work can

be exemplified by the very beginning of The Draughtman’s Contract.

When the initial credits show the name of one character and of the actor who plays it, the viewer

may notice an apparently minor reference: ‘August 1694’. The whole background is black, the

name of the actor is written in white letters, and the character and the date in red letters. The

color unifies these signs. Some details definitely matter. Many films have used the device of

setting the action somewhere in time, quite often in the near future. 2001: A Space Odissey or

Jonas qui aura vingt ans à l’an 2000 even turn this setting into the title of the film. When

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Greenaway places the action in the summer of 1694, he was summoning both a specific natural

light and a specific historical background.

As he reminds in his comments inserted in the DVD version1, the year of 1694 is connected with

meaningful references that function as non-diegetic devices. The Dutch protestant aristocracy

was firmly established in England. The Roman Catholic of the Stuart family had become a subtext

in the main text of power (James II was put away from the throne). ‘In Ireland, defeat at the Boyne

in 1690 marked the final eclipse of the culture of the “Old English”.’ (Kearney 170) The concern

with inheritance and old values were changing: 1694 was the year of the first Married Woman's

Property Act. Besides style and fashion were changing. With William of Orange a court built under

French influence was replaced by a Dutch style, eventually by a German style. 1694 also was the

year of the formation of the bank of England. As Greenaway says: “The world in England had

changed. Modern history begins.” (htpp.//greenaway.bfi.org.uk) A new ethos was emerging.

Mannerism gave way to a new aesthetic, the Baroque, with its ‘mighty katharsis by spectacle, by

an expressive power aesthetic.’ (Sypher 185) Baroque ‘law for exuberance’ supported this

emerging ethos. The Draughtman’s Contract characters will mirror this exuberance.

The Draughtman’s Contract is thus anchored on a Historical subtext that may be perceived by a

viewer who is willing to go through a veiled network of signs. It is here, in this network that

different subplots of power, involving religion, culture, nation, and gender, emerge echoing in the

main plot. This Historical subtext is hinted at by those small and yet meaningful words in red:

“August 1694”. Though remaining out of the frame, its relevance is determinant in the

development of the narrative.

There are other ways of implying a historical subtext, namely through the depiction of certain

ordinary signs in a rather staged composition. Later in the

narrative the viewer witnesses a social ritual: two characters

have tea. In its simplicity this is a rather beautiful picture: both

characters sit in a virtually closed space – virtually because the

space is opened up by the background window; a frame within

the frame. This window also frames them thus providing a sense

of theatricality inherent both to the ritual and to the situation depicted: ‘il y a dans le cadre

1 I shall rely on Greenaways’ precious insights both on the film structure and meaning, and on his artistic-biographical profile, which are inserted in the DVD. Among these I stress the idea of ‘framing-up’, and the notion: ‘draw what you see, not what you know.’ (cf. htpp.//greenaway.bfi.org.uk)

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beaucoup de cadres différents. Les portes, les fenêtres, les guichets, les lucarnes, les vitres de

voiture, les miroirs sont autant de cadres dans le cadre. ... Et c’est par ces enboîtements de

cadres que les parties de l’ensemble ou du système clos se séparent, mais aussi conspirent et se

réunissent.” (Deleuze 26).

The interaction between the obvious vertical lines (the candle, the teapot, the window, the

stained-glass, the lines of the bodies) and the more subtle horizontal lines (the window, upper

parts of the tea set, the line in upper left background, the lines of arms and hands, the man’s wig)

emphasise a decorous balance and stability. Like in Leonardo the chiaroscuro generates a feeling

of depth. But the ceremony needs further reading. Lucile H. Brockway’s Science and Colonial

Expansion – The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens unveils the connection between this

ritual and wealth/power: ‘Tea [was]… unknown in the West until the early seventeenth century

when the Dutch had the reexport monopoly from their Indonesian bases. The first direct tea

shipment to England was in 1699, and the British East India Company thereafter had a monopoly

on the English and North American tea trade, which was heavily taxed.’ (Brockway 52) Five years

before the first direct tea shipment to England this social ritual implied status, wealth2, and power.

As I have previously shown by the elliptical Historical context the British aristocracy was

discovering new cultural horizons. ‘Décors, personages, accessoires’ all build a cultural and

social frame within the frame. George Wilson rightly reminds that ‘[a]s a film proceeds, an

audience’s understanding of narrative developments depends not only upon its assimilation of the

information with which it is directly presented but also upon its grasp of an imposing complex of

inferences that it must make, consciously or unconsciously, from the visual manifolds that it is

shown.’ (Wilson 4)

At this stage one must put forward a concept of point of view that implies the unfolding of a whole

semiotic system. I shall quote again from Wilson’s Narration in Light – Studies in Cinematic Point

of View: ‘The concept of point of view should impose a categorization upon the domain of visual

narration in actual films, a categorization that depends upon the structuring properties of the film’s

overall rhetorical organization, properties that determine the base from which an ideally

perspicuous viewer assigns epistemic significance and value to the image track throughout its

course.’ (8)

2 Greenaway informs that the ceramic used in this scene was actually manufactured in Delft, Holland.

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Can we view this film on a strictly narrative dimension? The scene I have just briefly mentioned

takes place close to the dénouement. At this stage the viewer is aware of the narrative aesthetic

demands. The viewer already knows that he or she must be an active reader of each succeeding

frame, of each composition, sign, micro-narrative, colour. As the tea ceremony has shown the

composition functions as structural device in a formalist agenda which Greenaway anchored on a

specific epoch: ‘Here was formalism of another kind, using the stiffness and theatricality and

artificiality of Restoration drama, using elaborated spoken texts that often, but never completely,

threaten to defy comprehension because of their extended conceits and indulgent word-play, and

using music that always announces its self-conscious presence as though it was a concert piece

existing on its own terms and not merely fulfilling the obligations of illustrative film-mosaic. ’

(htpp.//greenaway.bfi.org.uk) The word and its vocal articulation should also be conceived of as

nuclear elements in the narrative. The close-up emerges as a privileged rhetorical device in order

to affirm their centrality.

The first frame of a character actually is a close-up: a face emerges in the

screen filling the whole space. In his essay ‘The Face in Close-Up’ Jacques

Aumont states that: ‘A face that is filmed intensively is always in close-up,

… A close-up always shows a face, a physiognomy. «Close-up» and «face»

are thus interchangeable, and what is at their common root is the process

that produces a surface that is both sensitive and readable at the same time…’ (Vacche 134) In

my view Aumont narrows this reading to the pathos consistent with artists such as Sergei

Eisenstein. In The Draughtman’s Contract the face actually functions as a social mask, thus

concealing its readability. This close-up reveals a preface, an introductory story of deception and

betrayal where gardens and gardening play a centre role: ‘they discussed plum trees ad nausea’.

Ironically the story foreshadows certain dimensions of the narrative that the viewer is about to

witness. This tautological dimension will play a structural role in the film.

Another aspect must be mentioned: the social setting deleted by the close-up. In the space

surrounding the frame the viewer may perceive an audience whose attention

is kept by the irony of the story. As Deleuze reminds: ‘Tout cadrage

détermine un hors-champ. … il y a toujours hors-champ, même dans l’image

la plus close.’ (Deleuze 29, 31) There is a speaker who is seen by the

viewer, and an audience whose presence is only felt. The viewer also

becomes aware of an aesthetic built upon composition and theatricality. The artificial candlelight

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emphasises the idea of frame as composition. At the same time the candlelight creates an

intimacy, a complicity between the speaker and the audience that is listening to his story. By the

end of the narrative, there is a raccord with this close-up: the face emerges again full screen but

now the mask has been fully assumed as theatrical social sign.

As I mentioned above the close-up frame implies an audience, an ensemble. In the next frame

the camera depicts the ensemble: Mrs. Virginia Herbert, the lady of the house, tells a story; a

story of (prosaic) tradition yet able to remind the viewer that the house belonged to her father.

Thus it subliminally implied that Mr. Herbert, her husband, ‘inherited’ the whole estate by marrying

her. Gender, tradition, and power lightly emerge in the narrative. Greenaway consciously created

‘a sense of artificiality and insularity by exaggerating the costumes, by the excessive wigs, by the

great display of lace with the women going back to the Huguenot of the North of France: the more

lace a woman could display the more wealth she showed.’ (htpp.//greenaway.bfi.org.uk) Baroque

exuberance and theatricality enhance a sense of dramatic composition where characters play

their own excessive roles.

In this frame the composition is spatially divided in two

identical opposite fields: women vs. men. Like in

Renaissance painting both spaces geometrically concur

when they outline two diagonals that lead the eye of the

viewer to a vanishing point: a mirror highlighted by two

candles. The mirror is a rather relevant sign since it reflects the characters, simultaneously

reproducing them and closing the space on itself. In an ostentatious postmodern context of

explicit and subliminal dialogues, the viewer as reader should be aware of an artistic and semiotic

echo: Velasquez’ Las Meninas. Michel Foucault prefaces Les mots et les choses with a famous

reading of this painting. He seems to foreshadow this scene when he writes: ‘Au fond de la pièce,

ignoré de tous, le miroir inattendu fait luire les figures…’ (Foucault 24) There is however another

reference that strikes me by the way it illuminates a relevant cultural theme of The Draughtman’s

Contract; the connection between the representation of this sign and Dutch painting: ‘Dans la

peinture hollandaise, il était de tradition que les miroirs jouent un role de redoublement: ils

répétaient ce qui était donné une première fois dans le tableau, mais à l’intérieur d’un espace

irréel, modifié, rétréci, recourbé.’ (23) When the mirror emerges as nucleus and reminder of the

Renaissance vanishing point, it summons a whole tradition in its cultural and aesthetic diversity.

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Besides we shouldn’t forget the importance of French aesthetic sensibility in England in those

days.

Its relevance will be asserted a few frames latter. Mrs. Virginia Herbert and Sarah Talmann, her

daughter, are depicted in a rather geometrical setting, framed

by two candles in the foreground. The lines of their framed

hair reinforce the vertical lines drawn by the candles. In the

background three candles emphasize the whole visual

geometry. The mirror plays an identical function in this virtually

closed space. I used the word ‘virtually’ because of a subtle

but relevant difference: the women’s eyes open up the space when they draw a line that goes

beyond the frame, ‘le hors champ’. The fruit in the foreground reminds the viewer of the story told

in the first frame while, at the same time, subliminally stresses the garden theme.

I mentioned that the women’s eyes draw a line that goes beyond the frame. They actually are

focused on a man, Mr Neville, a reputed draughtman. The next frame shows Mrs Herbert and Mr

Neville in a rather elaborated and stable composition (the square) whose signs summon the

previous frames: a frame divided in two fields (male vs.

female; black vs. white); the candles drawing the vertical lines

that frame the characters; the window (subtle reminder of the

mirror) also framing them; the fruit in the foreground; implicit

diagonals – an inverted triangle - creating a depth of field and

driving the viewer’s perception into a vanishing point; the

chiaroscuro. The whole composition evokes a pictorial agenda – a ‘pédagogie de l’image’

(Deleuze 24) – visually stressed by the stationary camera. I shall return to this topic a little further.

For the time being I must focus on Greenaway’s pictorial aesthetic. His aesthetic runs through the

film in three main directions: as structural device, as aesthetic

sympathy, and as subtext. I will focus the structural device a

little further. Now I just want to point out that the aesthetic

sympathy may summon ‘[t]he new anti-mannerist naturalism

[that] appears in the early Caravaggio, who shows, in spite of

his tenebrist somber vision, a concern to get back to

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«reality».’ (Sypher 188) The Baroque atmosphere consistent with The Draughtman’s Contract

background is thus subliminally hinted at by Caravaggio’s memory.

There is another moment when Greenaway’s hospitality towards painting becomes central in the

building of a composition. In this scene/frame the characters,

Sarah and her German husband, Mr. Talmann, have an

argument on inheritance and betrayal. The ‘wide shot summons

Dutch genre painting: both the door at end of the room and the

chandelier remind Vermeer, namely in The Art of Painting.’ 3 The

stationary camera brings a feeling of suspension, while the

single shot lasts for several minutes during which the characters move in the scenery. This

‘dureée’ emphasizes both the inner psychological tension of the characters and the pictorial

dimension. The space outside the frame is hinted at by the open door in background and by the

sunlight that comes through the window on the right enlightening Mr. Talmann. Greenaway’s

feeling for composition is also present in the different scenes depicting meals, which he shoots in

a continuous single plan/traveling without any cuts. These scenes would become the author’s

signature.

The third direction I have pointed out above - the pictorial as subtext - may be represented in this

frame. The picture behind the characters provides a subtext of

betrayal and power, the betrayal of Samson by Delilah. Latter

the viewer will understand how this ‘innocent’ image in the

background actually emerges as a powerful signifier of a

radical struggle for power, a symbol of women ascending to

power. The sign ominous and ghostly presence may be

summoned in a more conventional visual context; for instance

when fire and smoke create an atmosphere surrounding Mr. Neville’s return. Later the viewer will

understand how fire is a source of radical cleansing and destruction.

Why? Well, so far I have omitted any consistent reference to the main plot. Actually the reader

may wander if I have been infected by any subspecies of structuralist virus. I think the moment

has come for me to outline the main plot: Mrs. Herbert asks Mr. Neville, to make twelve drawings

of her Jacobean house and estate while Mr. Herbert is away in Southampton. Mr. Neville is

3 Greenaway’s comments inserted on the DVD version.

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famous and busy, so he declines. However he will be persuaded when Mrs. Herbert agrees to

meet some – should we say? - peculiar demands: twelve drawings will mean twelve sexual

encounters. The house, sign of wealth and power, will be the centre - even if a subliminal centre -

of Mr. Neville’s drawings. But the house also was in those days an aesthetic centre from which a

whole composition, the gardens, the estate, should emerge and be conceived of. In a treaty

written a few years later, De la composition des paysages, René-Louis de Girardin stated: ‘C’est

autour de l’endroit qu’on habite qu’il faut conduire la nature à venir à habiter.’ (Girardin 24) Hence

the analogy between architecture and painting, between geometry and gardening in the building

of a balanced harmony: ‘Tous les objets qui peuvent être aperçus du même point doivent être

entièrement subordonnés au même tableau, n’être que des parties intégrantes du même tout, et

concourir par leur rapport et leur convenance à l’effet et à l’accord general. … C’est donc sur

l’ensemble, ou le plan general, qu’il convient de réfléchir mûrement…’ (25) It is important to

notice the analogy between architecture and painting. The composition should depict an ideal

ensemble where every single sign ‘hors champ’ would be perceived or hinted at by the centre. Mr.

Neville will follow this notion when he starts drawing the house. Though he possesses the

knowledge and the skills that allow him to reproduce the geometry of the place, in a certain

sense, Mr. Neville is a stranger and he has a certain difficulty in understanding the atmosphere

that surrounds him. So he definitely gets it wrong: when everybody dresses in white, he wears

black; later, when he chooses white, the others choose black.

Like Peter Greenaway when he took his first lessons in painting and drawing, Mr. Neville follows

the dictum ‘Draw what you see, not what you know.’ An optical device similar to the one used by

painters like Canaleto supported his rigorous approach to his object. This device also provides a

theoretical approach to film narrative: the point of view which plays a structural role in

Greenaway’s ‘pédagogie de l’image.’ The draughtman’s point of view, his vision field, coincides

both with the viewer’s and with the director’s. The draughtman and the director are metonymies

of painting/drawing and of cinema. The analogy between these two identities demands a

readjustment of the viewer’s perception. The viewer is visually influenced by the ‘Hollywood

dynamic’, with its sometimes-schizoid rhythm. The Draughtman’s Contract ‘pédagogie de

l’image’, its pictorial dimension, point towards suspension. This suspension is emphasised by the

stationary camera and by the ‘durée’ of long shots that tell the viewer to act in the movie theatre

as if he or she were before a painting in a museum. Each succeeding frame functions as a picture

at an exhibition enjoyed and read by the viewer/beholder while he or she builds a narrative

succession: each frame/picture is a microscosm that summons the memory of previous

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frames/pictures, anticipates the frames/pictures to come, and inscribes itself in the main

plot/gallery. I must remind André Bazin’s words: ‘Filmic space, …, moves outward, centrifugally.’

Hence the strength of the pictorial analogy provided by the grid, both in terms of artistic creation

(draughtman - director) and of artistic perception (viewer of the film as beholder of a painting).

The empty space between each picture in the wall of a gallery becomes identical to the ellipsis

rhetoric in the editing process. This is another empty/void space that must be summoned and

filled; an intensifier of the ‘hors champ’ inherent to each frame.

I mentioned above that Greenaway’s pictorial aesthetic runs through the film in three main

directions: as structural device, as aesthetic sympathy, and as subtext. I already approached the

second and the third, now I must approach the first, pictorial aesthetic as structural device. The

draughtman’s rigour made him capture with his grid all the changes that eventually took place in

the different sceneries. Like his grid the drawing sheet is also symmetrically divided in squares.

Mr Neville’s fidelity to a mimetical principle would lead him into a dangerous process of revision of

his drawings: he actually inserted signs that were not present when he first drew the different

sights. When he was starting his first drawing a maid opened the window and unfolded a white

sheet. He stopped for a moment to think about what had just happened, and draw the new

emerging reality. Mr. Neville’s depiction of the gardens adorned

with a row of large obelisks - artificial forms framing nature

geometry - follows the same mimetic notion. In this shot

Greenaway almost juxtaposes the grid with the screen, creating

a frame within the frame. The viewer is reminded that his or her

perception and the draughtman’s coincide. Both perceptions

also coincide with the director’s: ‘on dira du plan qu’il agit

comme une conscience. Mais la seule conscience

cinématographique, ce n’est pas nous, le spectateur, ni le héros,

c’est la caméra.’ (Deleuze 34) Framing deals with power, since it

means capturing some signs and deleting other signs, ‘le hors

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champ’; these deleted signs will remain as ghosts in the viewer’s memory. Then Mr. Neville

enters stage and saturates the frame powerfully concealing the whole scene from the viewer. He

reminds the viewer that he is in charge. When he inserted himself in the narrative/picture he also

became part of it; he became an actor/an extra and summoned not only Hitchcok but a whole

filmic tradition.4

Mr. Neville also exercises an obvious power over the landscape.

He even criticizes the way man dealt with nature’s inner

geometry: ‘the angles between the branches are not correct.’

According to his instructions all the spaces that he is drawing

must be kept clear of servants and household. Nevertheless he

concedes that ‘animals are allowed to stay.’ Mr. Talmann asserted

that Mr Neville had the power of emptying nature. His wife, Sarah,

sharply replied that ‘for Mr Neville nature is strictly material’. There

is however some irony moving beyond his despotism. The

innocent eye of the child who mimics him somehow represents this

irony. Like Mr. Neville he tries to draw what he sees. The child may

be innocent when he is trying to reproduce reality. But Mr. Neville,

who is an adult, cannot be innocent. He is blinded by his hubris. And hubris leads to deception.

The child also introduces another sub-text: the subliminal tension between Catholics and

Protestants. Because of his father’s death Mr. Talmann took him under his protection. ‘He was an

orphan’, Sarah says. ‘An orphan?’ Angrily replied Mr. Neville. ‘Because is mother is a Catholic?!’

This episode concurs with the sub-text of religion and power that will underline Mr. Neville’s status

as Other among ‘la morne figure du Même’ (Foucault), the Protestant dominant ethos.

The first moment of deception is depicted in this scene. Mr. Neville

had drawn the sheets drying in the sun. In the following day when

he returns determined to complete his drawing, he realizes that a

coat had been inserted between those sheets. After some inquiries

and some suspicion concerning who put it there and who the owner

is, he decides to insert it in his drawing. The same thing will happen

later. He starts a drawing with a tree that somehow frames the

house. When he returns to this drawing, he looks through the grid –

4 I owe this reading to Professor Mário Jorge Torres.

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his point of view is also the viewer’s – and realizes that a shirt is hanging on the branches. He

stands up and walks towards the tree with the purpose of removing the shirt. At this stage the grid

frames him. The viewer’s point of view replaces his. Then he looks at the grid – like the painter in

Las Meninas his eyes touch the viewer’s - and decides to insert the shirt in his drawing. Sharply

Mrs. Talmann notices:‘The shirt is very strong in your picture.’ The prosaic Mr. Neville replies:

‘Madam, I try very hard not to destroy or disguise.’

Without being aware of it, he is now framed-up. The next situation happens with another drawing

of the house. When he returns to complete it, he looks through the grid and notices that a ladder

had been placed there. This ladder actually leads to Mr. Herbert’s office. Although he suspects

that something strange is happening, since ‘he draws what he sees, not what he knows,’ he

decides to insert the ladder in his drawing. Deleuze writes that: ‘Le cadre est inséparable de deux

tendances: à la saturation ou à la raréfaction. … des images raréfiées se produisent, ... lorsque

tout accent est mis sur un objet.’ (23-4) When Mr. Neville fills the frame he is saturating it. When

the viewer is directed to the ladder he or she is involved in a process of rarefaction. Both

processes have implications beyond an aesthetic level. As Deleuze also reminds: ‘des deux

côtés, raréfaction ou saturation, le cadre nous apprend ainsi que l’image ne se donne pas

seulement à voir. Elle est lisible autant que visible. Le cadre a cette fonction implicite, enregistrer

des informations non seulement sonores mais visuelles.’ (24) I wrote above that the frame must

be read as a microcosm that deals with a macrocosm, with a space that remain concealed,

forgotten, outside the frame, ‘le hors champ.’ Like Agatha Christie’s mystery novels, the film

becomes a ‘mystery narrative.’ The coat, the shirt, and the ladder are ‘crucial objet-signes’ or

‘cinèmes’ in this mystery.

When Mr. Neville returns in order to finish a panoramic view of the house, he notices that a pair of

boots had been left close to his seat. He turns to Mr. Talmann and says: ‘You forgot your boots,

Mr. Talmann.’ Mr. Talmann replies: ‘They are not mine. I thought they were yours, Mr. Neville.’ The

riding boots had been ominously mentioned before when Mrs. Herbert asked her servant: ‘D id my

husband take the riding boots?’ Also rather ominously she further asked: ‘Do you know which

road he will take back?’ At this stage the viewer already is aware of several signs pointing to

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some mystery. And so does Mr. Neville. Since he draws what he sees, not what he knows or

thinks he knows, these signs became a kind of puzzle that he had depicted in his drawings. He

recorded proofs and created a subliminal plot that actually leads to a murder. Like the most

perceptive characters the viewer must face the revision process of the drawings as a narrative

that is in the process of being built and fulfilled.

This is the turning point of the narrative: Mr. Neville’s method, his devotion to rigor and to the

mimetic principle framed him-up. Mr. Neville previously tried to interpret the events depicted in a

painting of a garden inside the house. His attempt was ironic since the painting mirrored what

was happening to him. He asked: ‘Do you see any narrative in these unrelated episodes? …

What intrigue is here? … What infidelities are here portrayed? Do you think that murder is being

prepared?’ The next scene reveals Mr. Herbert’s horse coming back home alone. ‘Painting

requires a certain blindness. A partial refusal of certain options. … An intelligent man knows more

of what he’s drawing than what he sees.’

As this frame shows, his point of view doesn’t coincide with the viewer’s. He is no longer in

control. Standing, Mrs. Sarah Talmann is now in charge. Sitting, in submission, Mr. Neville will

accept the terms of a new contract; a contract under her terms. So far her marriage has produced

no heir, and Mr. Talmann impotency has been previously suggested. The new contract will imply

that Mr. Neville should meet Mrs. Talmann demands. Without being aware of it he will help her to

produce the heir that will allow them to keep the estate in their hands. When Mr. Neville keeps on

recording the gardens he is also forced by his own method to insert the signs of another betrayal,

Sarah’s.

So far the main scenes of deception have taken place in the gardens. The reader may remind

that the first close-up was connected with a story of gardens and gardeners. Another relevant

subplot is implied in this theme, the one that opposes Mr. Neville to Mr. Talmann: Catholics vs.

Protestants. Mr. Talmann didn’t like carps because they lived too long. So they reminded him of

Catholics. On the other hand Mr. Neville told Mr. Talmann that God had planned the Garden of

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Eden for Ireland. Later the Catholic agenda will be definitely deleted when the Dutch puritan Mr.

Van Hoyton will be hired in order ‘to soften the geometry in the garden.’ Mr. Van Hoyton who

worked in the Hague (the same place Mr. Neville was supposed to be appointed to), talks in

Dutch with Sarah. Since his words are not translated the viewer will share Mr. Neville’s status as

outsider. Despite the fact of being ‘at home’, he actually becomes what he always had been: a

stranger, the Other. The landscape - the garden - is thus a text subjected to cultural changes, to

different inscriptions, and readings according to the main representations of power. Consequently,

its parts, its signs – fruits, for instance – also play a textual role in the changes of the narrative.

Eventually the garden is a reminder of the Original Garden, the Garden of Eden: its geometry

should remind Its primeval Presence.

In the beginning of the narrative the child’s perceptress told him (in German) the story of

Persephone. Following a tautological structure this episode anticipated another one close to the

end of the narrative. When Mr. Neville returned to the estate

after having met his contract demands he had another sexual

encounter with Mrs. Herbert. They were lying on the bed -

actually on a Persian carpet (these carpets came from the

Middle East and were very expensive; the Dutch considered

them far too expensive to put them on the floor so put them on

beds, and hang them on walls; with William of Orange these Dutch habits were imitated by the

British aristocracy) - and Mrs. Herbert told Mr. Neville about the Persephone’s myth and reminds

him of the fruit associated with it, the pomegranate. Looking to the left lower foreground the

viewer notices three pomegranates on the floor. When she finished

her story, he questioned with a clumsy irony: ‘A cautionary tale for

gardeners, Madam?’ And she wisely replied: ‘No. A cautionary tale

for mothers with daughters, Mr. Neville.’ The pomegranate is a

symbol that functions in the main plot as ‘objet-signe’ or ‘cinème’.

The reader must bear in mind that at this stage women are in total

command even when their power is subliminally exercised. The

women had learned a lesson from Persephone’s cautionary tale and

they acted accordingly in a functional and rather pragmatically way.

They knew that one could be fooled by illusions, even the attentive

eye of the painter could be deceived by colour: the pomegranate

juice looked like blood. Mrs. Herbert showed him this illusion while her daughter Sarah entered

15

the room and stood behind them. Because they have learned from Persephone’s myth both

women are associate in this plot for survival; a plot that may provide them an heir that will assure

the ownership of the estate. Then the women left the frame and

placed themselves somewhere ‘hors-champ’. Though absent

they remained a real presence. Mr. Neville looked puzzled since

only then he started to realize that he had been an instrument of

their designs. Significantly… and symbolically he is on his knees

looking to the space outside the frame, first to the left, then to

the right, then to the left again and so on. In this space ‘hors-champ’ the viewer senses powerful

presences, the presences of both women who now control the whole situation. Then in the next

shot, the stationary camera is placed behind Mr. Neville. The viewer sees the two women in a

rather geometrically balanced setting, aesthetically framed by the plants. Sarah dressed in black,

and Mrs. Herbert, in white, are not two fields of a dichotomy, but two parts of a whole.

Mr. Neville had fulfilled their wishes, but he also had been a victim

of his own method: his drawings were filled with compromising

signs. A perceptive reader could recognise in those twelve

drawings two narratives: a narrative of a murder, and a narrative of

sexual betrayal. Mr. Neville and his drawings were too dangerous

so only one solution remained: the death of the author, and the

burning of the evidences.

Despite the Historical setting and background it has become clear that this plot echoes Agatha

Christies’ murder mysteries. Actually like in Murder in the Orient Express all the family is

responsible for the murder. The perceptive viewer has gathered information from successive

signs: textual signs, objects, colours, settings, dialogues with other arts. The stationary camera

and the prolonged shots allowed the viewer to ponder on their presence, and on the relation that

they established with the powerful absence of the signs outside the frame. With this dialogue

between drawing and filming The Draughtman’s Contract puts forth a brilliant ‘pédagogie de

l’image’. The perceptive viewer will be enriched by its powerful aesthetic emotions.

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WORKS QUOTED

Brockway, Lucile H.. Science and Colonial Expansion – The Role of the British Royal Botanic

Gardens (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002)

Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)

Girardin, René-Louis de. De la Composition des Paysages (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1992)

Greenaway, Peter. “Comments” (htpp.//greenaway.bfi.org.uk)

Kearney, Hugh. The British Isles – A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989)

O’Hara, Frank. The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)

Pramaggiore, Maria and Tom Wallis. Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Laurence King, 2005)

Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style – Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-

1700 (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955)

Vacche, Angela Della ed. The Visual Turn – Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Jersey:

Rutgers, 2003)

FILMOGRAPHY

The Draughtman’s Contract, 1982, British Film Institute (DVD Costa do Castelo Filmes, S.A.

2004) Directed by Peter Greeanway.

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